Robert Louis Stevenson

About Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was a popular scottish poet and writer. Stevenson's novels of adventure, romance, and horror are of considerable psychological depth and have continued in popularity long after his death, both as books and as films. From his popular poetry books, A Child's Garden of Verses published in 1885, is the best one, written for children, the book is also popular with their parents. It includes such favorites poems as "My Shadow" and "The Lamplighter". Often thought to represent a positive reflection of the author's sickly childhood. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres. Condemned by authors such as Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached a height when in the 1973 2,000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature Stevenson was entirely unmentioned, and the Norton Anthology of English Literature excluded him from 1968 to 2000 (1st - 7th editions), including him in the 8th edition (2006). The late 20th century saw the start of a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the South Pacific, and a humanist. He is now being re-evaluated as a peer with authors such as Joseph Conrad (whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas fiction) and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organizations devoted to Stevenson. No matter what the scholarly reception, Stevenson remains very popular. According to the Index Translationum, Stevenson is ranked the 25th most translated author in the world, ahead of Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.
Here are featured below some of his best poetry works and selected pieces organised by topics and alphabetically.